Elon Musk and his “harem of mothers”
[This article was first published on our site on April 27, 2025, and republished on May 9]
Fatherhood looms large in the MAGA movement. While warming up a crowd at a Donald Trump campaign rally last year, [former Fox News host] Tucker Carlson portrayed the president as a stern father furious at the country's decline: " When Daddy comes home, you know what he says? 'You've been a bad girl, you've been a bad little girl, and you're going to get a good spanking.' "
Along the same lines, one of the most popular lines of Donald Trump merchandise features the slogan “Daddy's home .” Trump supporters readily imagine him as a conservative version of fatherhood, one based on domination and punishment.
But the Republican Party now has a very different version of fatherhood in the person of Elon Musk.
According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk spends his time scanning the horizon for new mothers for his children. Anything goes to seduce potential incubators: interactions on X, private messages, huge sums of money. The women must sign a legally binding contract with a confidentiality clause.
As a result, the number of Elon Musk's children is unknown, but it's likely well above the fourteen children we already know of. And their father shows no signs of stopping sowing his seeds.
Perhaps more interesting than the deals between Elon Musk and his harem of mothers, however, is the lack of traditional family ties between the parties.
Elon Musk clearly recognizes few, if any, genuine obligations and responsibilities between family members, let alone obligations of care and love.
Family relationships are reduced to mere financial arrangements for him, and the family certainly no longer has the importance it has in the traditional conservative conception.
After all, there's a difference between being pro-natalist and being pro-family. Elon Musk's interest in improving the birth rate is well known: he believes a catastrophic collapse in the world's population is imminent and that smart people need to reproduce more. ( “He really wants smart people to have babies,” his favorite concubine, Shivon Zilis, told a biographer.)
This penchant for eugenics makes Elon Musk the most prominent member of the techno-libertarian wing of the pro-natalist movement, which aims to produce genetically superior offspring and diverges from the traditionalist pro-natalist conception, with which it coexists.
The divide is real: technology versus tradition, future versus past, reproduction versus family. While traditionalists largely draw from the conservative Christian base that once animated the Republican Party, techies like Musk now have more resources and power to propagate their ideology.
However, even the most ardent supporters of Musk's reproductive philosophy will not be able to replicate the scale of his dynastic empire. Indeed, Elon Musk is uniquely positioned to finance these familial arrangements, which effectively reduce family relationships to mere financial ties.
Conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, his most recent partner, told Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli that he offered her a $15 million settlement, plus $100,000 a month in alimony, if she agreed to sign a contract with him requiring him to keep their arrangement secret.
According to people familiar with Musk's habits, this is an established practice for the billionaire: if the woman hires a lawyer or makes their agreement public, he threatens her financially.
When he and Ashley St. Clair ended up in court over a paternity test for their child, he reneged on his $15 million payout proposal and lowered his alimony to $40,000 a month (which, to be fair, is still a lavish income).
“The reduction in the payment amount comes at a time of disagreements over the paternity test and the gag order,” Dror Bikel, one of Ashley St. Clair’s lawyers, points out in the Wall Street Journal article. He adds:
“The only conclusion to draw is that [Elon Musk] is using his money as a weapon.”
Money, in fact, seems to be the only way Musk can convince people with whom he has no real intimacy and whose preferences and concerns he doesn't really care about. For him, paternity ends at conception, aside from a few payments.
There appears to be no mutual obligation or responsibility between Elon Musk and his children, nor between him and the mothers of his children, and no one expects these bonds to grow or find satisfaction in them.
An aide to Elon Musk told Ashley St. Clair that Shivon Zilis [a senior executive at Musk's startup Neuralink, who has four children with him] was "fluctuating between satisfaction and dissatisfaction" and that singer Grimes, another mother of Musk's children, would "never find true happiness."
This is hardly surprising. Elon Musk's family values seem completely detached from the usual bonds of familial love.
According to Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk creates what Ashley St. Clair calls “harem drama” : he grants some of his babies’ mothers, such as Zilis, special status both financially and socially, while others, like Ashley St. Clair, struggle to get a response to their text messages or, in the case of singer Grimes, their desperate X- rated posts.
Similarly, Elon Musk takes a more active interest in some of his children than others: for example, he regularly brings X Æ X-XII, his son with Grimes, to his public appearances and ceremonial events. But he refused to have his name appear on Ashley St. Clair's son's birth certificate and no longer has any contact with his transgender daughter, Vivian [whose mother is Justine Wilson].
While previous generations of conservatives viewed family as “a refuge in a heartless world,” Elon Musk’s relationships with his children and their mothers appear to be characterized by a form of competition with capitalist overtones.
His entire “world is designed as a kind of meritocracy,” Musk’s assistant explained to Ashley St. Clair: it’s a world where “people who do good work” are rewarded.
Elon Musk is rich enough to continue his pro-natalist agenda indefinitely, and the world is full of women of childbearing age who wouldn't turn down $15 million. It's therefore possible that his descendants could one day inherit the entire world.
But before that, Elon Musk may inherit the Republican Party he bought and paid for, and redefine the very concept of family. The good old days are gone and replaced by something worse.
